Financial Technology, Data, and Analytics

FinTech Approaches Are Changing Everything in the New Data Age? Our May Report on the FinTech, Enterprise Data and Analytics Industry.

The report found below gives our sense of the current m&a trends and deals in the FinTech, Enterprise Data and Analytics industries that we follow and sometimes lead.

Financial technology has revolutionized nearly every part of the financial services industry. And we see many of these same technologies such as automation or data and analytics being applied to other industry sectors from agriculture to healthcare. A potentially transformative recent example is JPMorgan making a bold move in the healthcare payments arena by buying InstaMed for more than $500 million. This could turbo charge deal making for such vertical plays further.

Rapid advancements in machine learning, AI and automation is driving a lot of this disruption. A combination of data, machine learning and natural language processing technologies are changing how enterprises develop and analyze information available to them; its changing how big data is being analyzed and used to help enterprises become more “customer experience” centric. Some of the most common use cases of this approach outside of financial services are currently seen in retail and hospitality sectors.

The vast and increasingly disparate data sources include fundamental data as well as data generated by business processes (e.g., commercial transactions), machine-generated data (like IoT, etc.) and alternative data sources such as social media. With such an explosion of data, users and consumers of data need to better hone in on what data to use, ensure that data is of high quality and comparable, and enhance capabilities to reduce response time thus informing timely decisions. To better handle this need for speed, complexity and volume, enterprise are increasingly turning to technology to automate processes. In the machine learning age, data and information is become richer and complex but also more predictive and organized.

Across many industries predictive analytics and process automation is being used to improve decision making and drive efficiencies. As more workflows are automated, professionals can focus on tasks that still require more sophisticated intelligence or judgment calls. Many companies are helping drive these changes. One such rapidly growing RPA company, UiPath recently raised $568 million in Series D round giving it a value of $7 billion. Another is our client that provides decision automation platform for financial services and healthcare companies as well as many government departments across the country.

We are in the midst of all this excitement and have been busy helping companies doing their bit in moving the ball forward with capital raise or m&a solutions.  As you will see from the enclosed report, m&a values and trends in this industry remain strong. A few interesting m&a transactions reflected in this report includes:

• Deutsche Börse (XTRA:DB1) agreed to acquire Axioma for $850mm, valuing the company at an implied 8.5x LTM revenue,
• First Data (NYSE:FDC) and AIB Group (ISE:AIBG) agreed to acquire Payzone for €100mm (~$112mm),
• Brex (San Francisco, CA) raised $100mm in a debt funding round led by Barclays Investment Bank,
• PayU (Zlin, Czech Republic) acquired Wibmo for $70mm,
• Bravura (ASX:BVS) agreed to acquire GBST for $124mm, valuing the company at an implied 1.7x LTM revenue and 9.7x LTM EBITDA.
• Marlin & Associates was the exclusive strategic and financial advisor to TABS Analytics. Read the full announcement here.

See below for our May FinTech, Data and Analytics M&A Update.